PPS teacher strike ends, school resumes
“As always in the bargaining process, it is our hope to have a successor agreement by June 30th, when the current agreement expires,” said Myhre.
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Students at Portland Public Schools (PPS) went back to school for the first time in almost a month on Monday, November 27th, when a teacher strike ended due to the teacher union and district reaching an agreement.
Portland Association of Teachers, representing teachers serving 44,000 students, reached an agreement with the Portland Public School District in regards to classroom sizes, more money, and planning time. Those sizes have 26 plus students and some of those have 36 to 56 students. It is less likely to have effective lessons in core classes such as math, science, and social studies when there are so many students. Because there are limited teachers already, to satisfy their classroom size ideal they would need to hire about 500 more positions and that would add to the cost at least $65 million more every year. It was concluded that teacher’s pay would rise by 11% in the next three years and they negotiated to have the same classroom sizes and offer teachers extra pay for teaching greater classroom sizes because it is just not possible to have more teachers.
Relating to the month that was missed by teachers and students, teachers will be paid in full for all the days missed. The negotiation will cost $175 million in the next three years but that’s not in their budget so they will have to make cuts in budgets and sacrifice part of their funds to make this possible. Because of 14 missed days, students and staff will have to use five days of their winter break, Dec. 18-22, three no-school days, and three inclement weather days from June 12-14 to make up what was missed.
As to David Douglas’ circumstance, they still have a contract which will end at the end of this school year. Once it’s over, a new process will start.
“We will be bargaining a successor Collective Bargaining Agreement with the district this year,” said president of the David Douglas Education Association (DDEA) Stephanie Myhre. “Our team has been collecting information, analyzing our current agreement, and developing our proposal for several months. The two teams (DDEA and DDSD) will start formal bargaining in February with an exchange of proposals. This starts the official bargaining timeline provided through the Public Employees Collective Bargaining Act (PECBA).”
The process starts off with a direct bargaining minimum lasting 150 days. Then mediation, minimum 15 days. Then an impasse occurs, and then the final offer and costing is within seven days of the impasse. After that there is a 30 day cooling off period which determines and gives the option to the employer to implement the final offer or the union could strike after a 10 day notice.
“As always in the bargaining process, it is our hope to have a successor agreement by June 30th, when the current agreement expires,” said Myhre.